Be Uncomfortable If You Would Be Successful

When you sit in Vajrasana – the yogic posture with your knees bent, your body takes it for a while and then revolts. If you prolong the position, you get a taste of what Indian yogic torture feels like! But Vajrasana has to be mastered if one has to progress in Yoga.

In business also, being ‘uncomfortable’ is being progressive. Being comfortable is slipping into ‘denial’ and into danger zone.

Take, for instance, the cases of Mark Zuckerberg (CEO of Facebook) and Mark Pincus (CEO of Zynga – a rags-to-riches-to-rags games company).

Both these Silicon Valley gentlemen were early adopters of Blackberry phones and conducted a lot of their business on them. They got ‘used to’ these black beauties. Later, when Apple’s iPhones stormed the market, both Marks resisted. While they saw millions of their consumers using iPhones, they ‘denied’ themselves the experience of the iPhone, since they were comfortable with their Blackberrys.

Unfortunately, this denial cost them, and cost them dearly. The first Facebook mobile roll out and application was pathetically slow and painful to use. The Facebook IPO actually listed mobile as its handicap! Zynga, on the other hand, was slow to develop iPhone games and when the market shifted from social games to mobile games, the company suffered.

Interestingly, later on, both Mark Z and Mark P publicly said that, “… they wish they had personally started using iPhones earlier. That way they would have understood their consumers’ mindset and the market opportunity better.”